ANATHEMA Frontman Vincent Cavanagh

ANATHEMA Frontman Vincent Cavanagh - "Even When We Were Writing The First Album, We Were Listening To Music That Wasn't Metal"

www.SeaOfTranquility.org recently caught up with ANATHEMA's Vincent Cavanagh. An excerpt from the interview is available below.

SoT: One of the best aspects about the band is that every Anathema album truly has a different style. You guys never repeat yourselves.

Vincent: "Yeah, we try (laughs)."

SoT: So the first couple albums you guys did were quite different from where you are now. They were more doom metal and death metal oriented, and then with Eternity, you moved away from that.

Vincent: "Well, even when we were writing the first album, we were listening to music that wasn't metal. Sure, we liked some of that kind of stuff, but it wasn't just that. The purest things on those first albums were things like 'Crestfallen', 'They (Will Always) Die', and 'The Silent Enigma'. And certain passages here and there where we realized that we had a talent for stringing together harmonies, like guitar harmonies, specifically, which sounded more like a classical string quartet than your typical guitar harmony at that time. They were all moving at different times. A lot of the harmonies, if you played them separately, they were unrelated to each other, but when you brought them together, they sounded like they were made to fit together. We felt that that kind of stuff was the honest side of us. As for the heavy stuff, I mean, we were sixteen years old and into that kind of thing. At the same time, I remember going on our first tour and speaking to CANNIBAL CORPSE about THE BEATLES, PINK FLOYD, and LED ZEPPELIN."

SoT: Oh, really?

Vincent: "Yeah, all those kind of bands. That's what we were really into then, but at sixteen, you kind of go into the most extreme things you can. Also, that's back when our original singer, Darren [White], was there and, by his own admission, is a different kind of singer. He does that growl stuff. It was quite evident that with the first album, we'd done that kind of stuff, and by the time we had to record the second, you know, he came to do his vocals but we knew we'd already moved on. He was still doing those same kinds of vocals and we said 'We're sorry but we need to try something different.'"